Hacker News: fallous

New comment by fallous in "The Productivity Mirage"

fallous — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:20:39 +0000

You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.

New comment by fallous in "The war on terror primed America for autocracy"

fallous — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:30:12 +0000

There are no Dixiecrats if you've hanged all the slave owners after the Civil War, and clearly Reconstruction is entirely different since you've purged most of the white population in the South (as well as some from the Union, since Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey still had slavery).

New comment by fallous in "The war on terror primed America for autocracy"

fallous — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:50:21 +0000

Your argument/timeline seems a bit confused in a couple of places. Our problem was "not stringing up all the slave owners after the Civil War," yet you then point out American industrialists (going back to the robber baron era) loved fascism. But the industrial parts of the US were the Northern states, not the South. Additionally you complain that the Democrats are no effective opposition but don't appear to consider that the Democratic Party would be even less effective if you had strung up all the slave owners after the Civil War given that it was that party which chose to secede from the Union in order to maintain slavery.

History indeed did not begin with the War on Terror, but I'm not sure you're entirely familiar with it.

New comment by fallous in "A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison"

fallous — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:30:17 +0000

Nukes launch Chuck Norris at their enemies.

New comment by fallous in "Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it"

fallous — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:58:52 +0000

Agreed that on first blush it looks like Chesterton's Fence but it may be more of a cargo culting situation.

New comment by fallous in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

fallous — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:08:50 +0000

Mutually Assured Distraction.

New comment by fallous in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

fallous — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:22:18 +0000

It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s). What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.

New comment by fallous in "The Ask"

fallous — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:30:35 +0000

Adding AI to an organization that is somehow making process decisions based on "vibes" isn't going to solve problems, it's simply going to add yet another problem generator to a dysfunctional system.

New comment by fallous in "Why AI systems don't learn – On autonomous learning from cognitive science"

fallous — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:57:38 +0000

The question is does this eventually lead us back to genetic programming and can we adequately avoid the problems of over-fitting to specific hardware that tended to crop up in the past?

New comment by fallous in "I miss thinking hard"

fallous — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:51:50 +0000

Yes, but as with outsourcing those who are making such decisions often lack the awareness, or even skills, to properly specify the requirements and be able to evaluate the results.

New comment by fallous in "I miss thinking hard"

fallous — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:49:41 +0000

If the on-premise offshoring centers around the use of LLMs then I suggest the term "off-braining." :)

New comment by fallous in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

fallous — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:45:03 +0000

The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.

Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.

New comment by fallous in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

fallous — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:40:09 +0000

Heh, I was at Netscape when the Sun-Netscape Alliance was created. Tip of the hat to a fellow gray beard. ;)

New comment by fallous in "I miss thinking hard"

fallous — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:51:31 +0000

You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.

New comment by fallous in "Playing Santa changed Bob Rutan profoundly"

fallous — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:50:39 +0000

So many are desperately wishing to be the next Tom Wolfe rather than striving to find their own voice and style (as Wolfe did).

New comment by fallous in "Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025"

fallous — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:10:00 +0000

You're arguing from an end-user perspective, I'm pointing out that the Internet wasn't designed to solve easy but fragile problems but instead was intended to be a resilient network capable of surviving failures and route around them.

"I want to use a power tool and simply plug it into a wall" is not the same class of problem as "we're using a heart-lung machine during this bypass operation and power loss results in dead patients."

The widespread dependence upon Cloudflare has resulted in the "heart-lung machine" problem of DNS, among other things, being "solved" by a "power tool" class of solution.

New comment by fallous in "Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025"

fallous — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 16:55:40 +0000

Your electricity to servers IS a single point of failure, if all you do is depend upon the power company to reliably feed power. There is a reason that co-location centers have UPS and generator backups for power.

It may have been unthinkable to some casual observers that creating a giant single point of failure for the internet was a bad idea but it was entirely thinkable to others.

New comment by fallous in "Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025"

fallous — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 03:24:58 +0000

"My architecture depends upon a single point of failure" is a great way to get laughed out of a design meeting. Outsourcing that single point of failure doesn't cure my design of that flaw, especially when that architecture's intended use-case is to provide redundancy and fault-tolerance.

The problem with pursuing efficiency as the primary value prop is that you will necessarily end up with a brittle result.

New comment by fallous in "It's hard to build an oscillator"

fallous — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:08:39 +0000

If you combine a 3 year-old, whose favorite word is "why?", and the ambition of a 7 year-old you might just end up with the most productive genius possible.

New comment by fallous in "Thunderscan: A clever device transforms a printer into a scanner (2004)"

fallous — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 03:58:11 +0000

If you think that resolution is terrible, you should've tried my lightpen-based "scanner." ;)